"Trauma is the most significant disease in terms of young lives lost. However, unlike cancer or heart disease, this is a disease we can prevent.”

Dr. Jeffrey Stuart Augenstein gave 37 years of his life to that cause, as described to The Miami Herald in 2009.

The University of Miami-trained surgeon co-founded Jackson Memorial Hospital’s Ryder Trauma Center, which he helped design, and ran it for five years.

He directed the William Lehman Injury Research Center at UM’s Miller School of Medicine, where his work led to lifesaving advances on highways, battlefields, and in disaster zones.

His research for the Association for the Advancement of Automotive Medicine led to the “de-powered’’ airbag, which improved on earlier devices that sometimes killed the drivers and passengers they were designed to protect.

“He did detailed crash analysis, and his original research figured out that the first generation of airbags were too powerful and caused a lot of injuries,’’ said Dr. Carl Schulman, Lehman co-director.

Augenstein, who died unexpectedly Saturday during a business trip to California, had been a safety consultant to BMW for 20 years. He created electronic record keeping at Ryder as part of a program to train frontline military medical personnel, worked on a “black box’’ recorder that GM installed in six million cars during the 1990s, and pioneered “telemedicine’’ technology that enabled surgeons in Miami to guide doctors in Haiti and in Middle Eastern war zones in real time.

“Jeff was considered a giant in the field of computerized trauma learning, injury prevention and patient care,’’ said Dr. Alan S. Livingstone, the Lucille and DeWitt Daughtry Professor and Chairman of the DeWitt Daughtry Family Department of Surgery. “With his extensive involvement in education, research, and clinical care, he was a true triple threat...He worked closely with car companies and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration to incorporate ‘real-world’ crashes into the study of automobile trauma, and then to modify automobiles to improve survivability in an accident.’’

Augenstein “was also a humanitarian, as exemplified by his early and continued involvement in the aftermath of the disastrous Haitian earthquake,” Livingstone added.

Surgery was his passion, said Augenstein’s wife, Deborah Greenberg Augenstein, but he had to stop performing it in 2007, after injuring his back during a trauma procedure.

“He loved being a surgeon so much that when he was not able to do it anymore, if people were describing surgical techniques at conferences, he’d leave the room in tears,’’ she said.

The Miami Beach native and Norland Senior High graduate, born June 28, 1947, was found dead in a Los Angeles-area hotel room on the day he was due home in Coral Gables. His wife said he’d been traveling almost non-stop since Jan. 23, to Dubai, Washington, D.C., then California.

She said he worked constantly, relaxed by reading technical manuals, hadn’t taken a vacation since visiting Colonial Williamsburg in 1987, or seen a movie since the 1997 blockbuster Titanic.

An autopsy was performed Tuesday.

At the time of his death, Augenstein was working on what Schulman called an app-like “holistic system of electronic care and teaching’’ that stores and retrieves patient information, finds research on medical conditions, and can “immediately access help’’ for the doctor using the system.